What a difference a year makes…

My last post was over a year ago. In that time I have worked for three different companies, taken several trips, spoken at CodeGarden, and continued to deepened my knowledge of Umbraco programming and reignited my slightly dormant interest in business and marketing. My minor obsession with efficiency and process hasn’t abated in this time – and if anything, has been fiercely flourishing. None of these things have much to do with my blogging hiatus, however. Instead the silence is due to something I’m sure I’m not the only one to suffer from – timeline optimism.

You see, about a year ago I decided that it was time to completely reprogram this blog. Not only a new design, but for the whole thing to be transitioned over to Umbraco 7. Luckily, Shannon’s Articulate blog package had become available, and I figured it would be a relatively simple process. Articulate itself worked seamlessly – importing years of historical blog posts – images and all. Post-import, though, I realized that I would want to customize some things, and didn’t have the experience necessarily to do that as simply.

In addition, my somewhat rusty CSS skills were put to the test fixing up the new design and making sure that it was displaying responsively. While this was all in process, I changed jobs and found myself working so hard that by the end of the day, I just wanted to shut the computer off – not spend more time on my personal project. So it languished for several months before I was able to pick it up again, and try to remember what I had been working on. I did get re-organized, though, and started keeping a list of the things I needed to fix and finish. I also started to sort them, Agile-style into “must have” for relaunch, and “nice to have later.” This was key – and primarily a possibility due to my decision to host the new blog on Umbraco as a Service, which allows for more seamless continual deployment. Of course, changing the deployment plans meant a bit of reorganizing of code, further stretching out the project.

It’s amazing how “doing it right” can end up taking so much longer up-front, but pays dividends after the fact. So, to make a year-long story short… Here I am – a new blog, and a new post! I plan on being more diligent with writing going forward - along with making continual tweaks and improvements. I hope you enjoy the new set up, and come to visit sometimes.

About the Author

Heather Floyd has been involved in website and software development for almost 20 years and developing with the Umbraco CMS since 2006. She specializes in information architecture and development efficiency. In addition, she has originated and contributed to various Umbraco and .Net-related open source projects. Heather speaks internationally about Umbraco and is a founder of the NYC Umbraco Meetup group. She currently provides development consulting as well as business strategy.